El Reg reports
Former engineer James Robert Liang took a plea deal with the US federal government to cooperate with its ongoing investigation of how the German car maker cheated American emissions tests and passed off its "clean diesel" engines as meeting state and government clean air standards.
While VW executives have claimed that the use of a defeat device to artificially limit emissions during tests was the work of a "couple of software engineers", Liang's plea deal shows that the conspiracy dates back roughly a decade and has roots in the team that designed the engines.
In other words, Liang claims the design team was in on it, not just a couple of bad apples.
Liang told the government that in 2006, engineers knew the EA 189 diesel engine would not be able to meet clean air emission standards on its own. Rather than attempt to redesign the engine, he and other members of the design team deliberately cheated the testing system.
[...] He said that the device was used to get the clean air certification on VW's "clean diesel" models from 2009 to 2016, and that the group continued to lie about the emissions output of the engines even after the US government began its investigation.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:38PM
Here we see a rather boring example of a rather large group of people who almost got away with a large conspiracy. Not that this legitimizes any specific conspiracy theory, but we as a society need to stop immediately shunning people when they believe a conspiracy is happening. Yes, it can totally happen, and this story is proof. These people did it for the good of their company / to keep their job / they are just sheep. I see no reason why a more sinister conspiracy could not be carried out by using threats of violence, it obviously is possible.
Everyone must decide for themselves where the line is drawn, but I witness too many people that toss out ideas simply because it jars with their personal worldview. If something is plausible, you should allocate some small percentage of "it could be true". When we arbitrarily (with no evidence for or against) decide to believe a certain viewpoint and reject all others we are closing our minds. This is a disfavor to yourself.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:12AM
> Not that this legitimizes any specific conspiracy theory, but we as a society need to stop immediately shunning people when they believe a conspiracy is happening.
The difference in this case is that no one was alleging a conspiracy until after the proof was discovered by accident. The person who uncovered it all was not looking to bust VW, they were looking to support them. They wanted to disprove complaints about EU pollution specs being unrealistic by proving that in America VW was able to meet those requirements.